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Cultural Values
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Culture without society

a
Alain Touraine
a
École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales , C.A.D.I.S.
Published online: 17 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Alain Touraine (1998) Culture without society, Cultural Values, 2:1, 140-157, DOI: 10.1080/14797589809359291

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 Cultural Values ISSN 1362-5179
Volume 2 Number 11998 pp. 140-157

Culture Without Society

Alain Touraine
C.A.D.I.S. École des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales

Endowed by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, the Annual Blackwell Lecture in

Public Culture is hosted by the Institute for Cultural Research at
Lancaster University. It provides an opportunity for scholars or public
figures of international distinction to reflect upon the analytics and
problematics of public culture. Each Lecture will be published in
Cultural Values in lieu of the 'Cultural Notes' for that issue. The 1997
Blackwell Lecture was given by Alain Touraine at the I.C.R. Time and
Value Conference.
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Definitions of culture, which are innumerable since Tylor, are both

imprecise, as they are often nothing but long or short enumerations, and
a source of confusion, since they do not enable us to distinguish between
culture and society. If we wish to use a descriptive idea of culture, it is
therefore wiser to adopt the aggressively empirical definition offered by
Claude Levi-Strauss: 'any ethnographic unit which, from the point of
view of the researcher and in comparison with other units, presents
significant differences'. This definition may seem voluntarily perplexing
since nothing guarantees that the differences observed between two
cultures are interdependent or systematic. Now, if there exists no unity
and therefore no specificity of each culture, and if we wish to go beyond
this observation of differences, we must make the hypothesis that the
unity or the central principle of a culture are not systemic, but rather are
what society itself considers as its unifying principle, while the word
'society' seems to refer to a diversity of situations. Rather than saying, as
Kluckhohn, Tylor or Riviere do, that a culture is made up of a heritage,
of a set of patterns of behaviour which we acquire as members of a given
society, or of the symbolic objects which a society produces in order to
transmit its values, should we not say that culture is the voluntaristic
construction of a set of norms and practices? This unity thus enables a
central regulating power system to control, limit and even repress the
diversity of interests, of opinions and of representations. That, in turn,
©Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1998,108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX41JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Maiden, MA 02148, USA
 Culture without Society 141

would explain why it has been impossible in the past to separate the
idea of culture from the idea of society, since the definition of culture is
precisely what makes possible the construction of a unified society,
which, without a cultural unity, would appear segmented or organised
merely around the division of labour.
The foregoing explains why we spontaneously speak of culture in
cases where a society appears to have strong self-regulating
mechanisms. In the most extreme cases, we may even use the term
community, as did Louis Dumont, after Tonnies, to define a holistic unit
in which culture and society entirely overlap, whereas the idea of society
(Gesellschaft) only appears precisely when the cultural control of
practices is limited: a situation which in turn increases the chances for
change. But, as it has been underlined by Fredrick Barth - who
successfully reacted against culturalist approaches and who insisted on
the autonomy of the means and strategies for access to resources - the
separation of culture and society should perhaps be recognised even in
apparently integrated communities.
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Empires and kingdoms, by bringing together religious authority and

political power, have given the strongest significance to the idea of
culture. For in such cases culture is not a structure but rather a means for
producing order and linking together religious values and social
hierarchies with technical and economic practices. Culture is thus
inseparable from an absolute, traditional and monarchical power.
Secularisation and the rise of British and French style nation-states
which eventually became political democracies, limited culture's scope
and power. While religious freedom was slow to be accepted, it was
nonetheless the social order which was in command, and no longer the
religious order. Culture thus became to a large extent a class culture or a
dominant ideology, uniting the interests and the representations of the
dominant class with the legal and educational principles which served to
maintain the social order.
This new situation of culture reflects one of the two aspects of
modernity. The second is the development of moral individualism and
the increasing differentiation of social sub-systems: religion, family, art,
economy etc., which has reduced the strength of central power and thus
of culture as society's unifying force. Yet critical thinkers, notably Michel
Foucault, have given a priority to the first aspect of modernity, that is the
internalisation of social controls and the reinforcement of the
mechanisms of control and repression.
And it is true that modern societies have been dominated for a long
period of time by a civic morality that influenced laws and behaviour,
especially during the French and American Revolutions, and which then
reappeared in the new forms of republicanism of emerging Latin-
American countries and of most recent nation-states. In all these
examples the idea of culture has remained strongly connected to that of
 142 Alain Touraine

society. Nevertheless, such a link is no longer self-evident. It was

produced and maintained by a national consciousness. Culture thus
became more and more wilfully produced, notably in the countries
which acquired their national unity in the nineteenth century. At this
time German intellectuals opposed their idea of Kultur to the French (or
English) idea of Civilisation. This reveals the voluntaristic nature of
culture, far more than many other examples. Culture is not only made of
values or of symbolic objects - corresponding to the diversity of habits
and customs as Swift and Montesqieu believed - it is first of all the
constitution of social unity. Such an idea refers to the existence of a power
as well as to the social production of symbols, values and means of
regulating customs and knowledge.
At the end of our century, as the entire world is witnessing the
second capitalist revolution, often called globalization, and that can be
defined first and foremost as the freeing of the economy from social and
political controls, classical definitions of culture are trying to survive. We
speak of popular culture, in other words of models of behaviour and
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knowledge which are transmitted through the mass media. But the
expression is not convincing. For while communication and information
technologies do have profound effects on our conceptions of time and
space, it is impossible to ascertain that they produce identical
representations and values in all parts of the world.
We have rapidly traced the increasing separation of culture from
society, and the subsequent decline of the idea of culture, which I have
defined as a creation of a system of order, of laws and interpretations, in
other words of a self-representation through which society makes power
and hierarchies legitimate and marks the limits between that which is
allowed and that which is forbidden between members of society and
foreigners. This explains that in our strongly differentiated and ever-
changing societies the significance that we give to the idea of culture is
constantly weakening, and has easily come to be replaced by the idea of
'life styles' or even of 'patterns of consumption': notions which refer to
the social organisation itself, which is more linked with economic
activity than with cultural principles.

II

But this weakening notion of culture has already been replaced by

another concept, one that separates even more completely society from
culture, and that even comes to define culture through its opposition to
society. Contemporary societies, especially those which are most
involved in the process of globalization, are best defined by a process of
the desocialisation of the economy and by the rapid growth of a
complex, ever changing and broadening technological and economic
 Culture without Society 143

universe that cannot be transformed through institutions into behaviour

and motivations. The framework of classical sociology thus collapses.
Instead of observing the ways social institutions transform cultural
values into practices, or inversely, the ways practices are transformed
into norms and values through social power relations, we witness the
triumph of instrumental reason; of a technological civilisation devoid of
the norms and values characteristic of previous societies that guided and
controlled individual behaviour thanks to socialisation agencies and the
application of the law. Today, there no longer exists a unifying principle
of social life. Social life seems constantly transformed by technological
and economic change which have become independent from social
institutions and value orientations. In negative terms we call this process
a crisis of political institutions; in positive terms, a growing cultural
tolerance. Family and sex behaviour, educational programs and political
regimes, no longer have any direct relations with technological and
economic activities. Cultural principles disappear even more than
institutions and become alienated from technical and economic activities.
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And since the link between our occupations and our social norms has
been broken, we cease to be social beings. Our identities must take shape
in relation to our origins or our nature, no longer in relation to our social
roles and statuses. These identities tend to produce their own
organisation of social life: and thus communities are reconstructed. The
evolution which, according to Tonnies, Durkheim, Linton and so many
others, was to lead us from community to society, from mechanic to
organic solidarity, from status to contract, from ascription to
achievement, or from a holistic society to an individualistic one, seems to
have been reversed.
At the end of our century each of us witnesses the return of
ascription, the rise of ethnic nationalisms and of what Gilles Kepel has
called Godls Revenge. In such a situation, not only does culture no longer
command society, but culture turns against economic power and social
organisation which it considers as threatening. Because the new
communities no longer define themselves through the administration of
the technological and economic world which now appears to be
threatening them, they inevitably become dominated by authoritarian
powers. Such powers defend the community's unity and homogeneity,
while economic evolution, and particularly mass consumption and
techniques of communication, tend to reinforce the diversity of interests
and life styles. These communities can therefore not define themselves
through a return towards cultural and social unity such as is found in
'traditional' societies. They belong to modernity and to an increasingly
globalised economic world, against which they defend their identity.
Their unity is therefore more political than cultural. For example most of
the so-called Islamist movements or regimes are defined less by their
reference to Islam than by an authoritarian form of power, whether in
 144 Alain Touraine

Saudi Arabia, Iran or in the FIS and the GIA movements in Algeria. This
is why they cannot be called fundamentalist movements, but rather neo-
communitarian or communalist regimes, both modernising and
authoritarian.
This increasing separation of the economic and cultural spheres gives
way to the decomposition of what we once called society. In 'societies',
economic, political and cultural spheres were largely co-extensive
because, beyond the diversity produced by the division of labour, they
needed a unifying cultural principle in order for the political system to
be able to combine the diversity of interests and the unity of the law.
This link has been broken: social and especially political institutions
have become largely powerless, while, on the one hand, the economy
becomes increasingly world-wide, and, on the other, identity politics are
progressing. And, we must add, this decomposition of society does not
only lead to the degradation of culture into community. For it also leads
to the degradation of the economy into financial flows and networks
which are increasingly distant from any social objective. This is an old
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idea, strongly stated at the beginning of the century, notably by

Hilferding in his Finanz-Kapital, at a time when, particularly in England,
globalization had reached an even higher level than today. We refer to
this evolution as well, when we recall that only two per cent of
international flows of capital represent international trade, and that
therefore international finance capitalism greatly overflows relations
between national industrial capitalisms. We are indeed witnessing a
dual process of degradation: the development of the economy of
production into a financial economy, and the transformation of cultures
into neo-communal powers.
In such a situation, culture has entirely lost its unifying power. I call
such a widening gap between economic flows and cultural identities
demodernization. Is it irreversible? Have we therefore entered into a
postmodern situation, characterised by the disappearance of all unifying
principles of social life? This postmodern thought is in fact divided
between two opposing and complementary orientations. According to
the first, we have entered into a society of pure differences where modes
of production and of cultural consumption are free from all norms.
Accordingly, we should reject all evolutionist or ethnocentrical
representations which opposed what is modern to what is traditional
and which introduced the idea of progress. If we accept this extreme
differencialism, we must admit that communication between differing
individuals and groups can only occur through segregation, physical
distance, the formation of urban ghettos connected only through the
market system, which does not need any principle of unity between the
buyer and the seller. In many aspects, American society represents such
an image. It is a fragmented society in which communities operate
strong means of control over their members, and in which, at the same
 Culture without Society 145

time, powerful transversal communication networks operate. As for the

second type of postmodernism, which is not liberal like the first one, but
radical, this decomposition of society signifies its increasing dependence
upon logics of power. These logics of power are omnipresent and
diffuse, present in administrative categories as well as in media
messages. In other words, the unifying role of culture takes on the shape
of an ideology at the service of the dominant forces, less represented by
the dominant classes than by the system itself.
The strength of these two positions is that they reflect the shared
feeling that we no longer have any control over our environment, and
that we should therefore give up our domination over nature. This also
leads us to believe that power is omnipresent and all powerful, and that
challenges, conflicts, reforms or even communication are no longer
possible. Faced with the triumphant theme of globalization and with the
decomposition of industrial society's social movements as well as all
former liberation movements, postmodern intellectuals, armed with
their radical critiques of social actors, see themselves as the only real
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opponents to power. However, their complete deconstruction leads to a

denunciation of the established order rather than to the creation of a
capacity for collective action.

Ill

If we accept these representations of our world, we must do away with

any reference to culture as a producer of normative meanings and
interpretations of practices. But is this absence so complete, and do we
really live in a world in which nothing can regulate and control
economic life, personal conducts and logics of power? A postmodern
answer is possible, yet there exists another one. It is not new: it has long
been opposed to a social organisation governed by instrumental
rationality, private interest and a set of power relations, a moral
individualism which we easily transform, by legal and institutional
means, into human rights, into the ideas of freedom, equality or justice
which can act as counter principles of social organisation and of personal
behaviour. Culture, which was formerly a set of values and norms of
social organisation, becomes a non-social moral principle aimed at
limiting and controlling all social logics, whether that of rationalisation,
of the market economy or of class domination. Culture acts upon both
the economic sphere and neocommunalist policies from outside, by
opposing natural law to positive law or to an ethnic, national or religious
essence. In the past, these moral principles have taken on many different
forms, from religious beliefs to secularised moral individualism, but, in
all cases, it is only to the extent that personal and collective behaviour
 146 Alain Touraine

are inspired by these moral principles that a society can avoid the
breakdown which postmodern thought sees as inevitable.
We must now specify the present nature of this moral and cultural
principle.
In a society which no longer recognises any transcendental order -
neither divine law, reason nor a philosophy of history - my hypothesis is
that the only unifying, or at least mediating, principle between the world
of instrumentality and the world of identity is each individual's or each
group's desire to combine these two worlds within its own experience,
within its own personal life story. I call this desire Subject, namely the
will to integrate instrumental action and cultural identity into a personal
life project, more precisely, into a project oiindividuation. All the cultural
principles of social integration have been ruined by the separation of
strategic action from what, after Weber, the philosophers of the
Frankfurt school called the life world (Lebenswelt). There is therefore no
other possibility but to seek such a combination, not above social
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organisation, but rather below it, at the individual life level where
resistance to this rupture is strongest. In other words, we must give
priority to the level of individual life, for at this level a rupture means
the destruction of one's personality: which is strongly resisted. Two
centuries ago it was still possible to limit human rights to public and
even civic life, based on the ideas of peoples7 sovereignty and general
will (according to Hobbes and Rousseau). That separation between the
political sphere, the economic life and the private life, has become
impossible because, on the one hand, economic life has spread beyond
the national state, and, on the other, private life has invaded the public
sphere. The latter trend has been made possible by the development of
mass consumption and communication, and even more by the means
given to us by biology and medicine to act upon our body and our
personality. Already in industrial society a purely political concept of
human rights has been overridden by claims for social rights.
This is even more true today with the demands for cultural rights. In
other words, by our request to combine our participation in the techno-
economic sphere with the defence or the reinterpretation of our personal
and collective identity. We cannot avoid the search for the construction
of a Subject capable of dominating the Id, after the destruction of the
idea of consciousness and of its social content. This search was central in
Freud's work ('Wo Es war, Soil Ich Werden'). By attributing a positive
meaning to a term which Foucault considered as negative, I call this
construction of the Subject subjectivation, something which can be neither
defined nor justified in purely social terms. We refer neither to the
common good and the general interest, nor to a divine or natural law,
but to a moral claim. It represents the complete fragmentation of socio-
cultural entities. Societies are no longer unified by cultural principles or
by logics of power. In this world, culture can only be a way to limit and
 Culture without Society 147

to prevent the separation between the sphere of instrumentality and that

of identity. The demand for individual freedom, and thus for
individuation, represents the only possible mediation between the
economy and identities which are becoming increasingly obsessed with
their search for purity and homogeneity.

IV
In order for this hypothesis to be validated, we must demonstrate that
the major social movements embody the will for subjectivation, and that
they therefore constitute a coherent whole. This assertion seems difficult
to defend at a time when most sociologists insist upon the increasing
diversification of collective demands, of protest movements and of
political reforms. Nevertheless, against this widespread belief, I defend
the idea that all major social movements are oriented by the same
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principle, the search for the individuation that I have just defined. Only
this principle can make social reconstruction or reform possible, and is
therefore able to limit the autonomy of the economic sphere as well as
that of the communitarian powers. Is this not the case for the women"s
movement? This movement does not simply claim equality of rights for
women, or their absolute right to difference. Its main goal and major
effects has been to substitute the identification of human beings with a
masculine model with the recognition that the most universal and
general definition of human beings is the male-female duality. This has
led women to become better than men in consciously combining their
professional and their personal lives. Such a process is precisely what
defines the Subject. Other important social movements in our countries
defend the rights of minorities, whether ethnic, religious, national or
sexual. What else do they ask than to have free access to professional
and economic activities and, at the same time, to enjoy recognition of
their cultural identities, whether traditional or reinterpreted in the sense
that Charles Taylor speaks of as the politics of recognition!
It is not as easy to apply the same analysis to the ecological
movement, which has so many different tendencies. But most actions in
defence of the environment, and most political interventions on the part
of the ecologists, aim at promoting sustainable growth, while defending
the diversity of species and cultures. These two complementary
orientations are based on the idea of the interdependence of all elements
of 'one world', considered as a Subject.
These important examples show how the will for individuation
expresses itself through the double battle against a globalized, in other
words desocialized, vision of the economy, on the one hand, and against
communitarian confinement on the other. They demonstrate that the
idea of the Subject does not lead us toward a superficial view of
 14& Alain Touraine

individualism, as dominated by mass consumption and communication,

but rather defines a new type of social movement that consequently
makes possible the reconstruction of the political sphere thanks to what
we can call the politics of the Subject: a politics which refers first and
foremost to a new conception of democracy.

V
For a long time, we have defined democracy as the assertion of a general
will, considered to be the true expression of people's sovereignty. This
left us powerless when faced with authoritarian regimes such as the
Leviathan, the Terror of the French Revolution, Bolshevik, Fascist or
Nazi totalitarianism. But, on the other side, we cannot be satisfied with a
liberal conception of democracy which allows for the development of
inequalities, and even less with an elitist conception such as that of the
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Whigs, the founders of the United States, or of the French liberal thinkers
such as Tocqueville or Guizot, who limited democracy to a free choice
between competing political teams. According to a British - rather than a
Continental or American tradition - first inspired by Locke, we consider
that democracy entails the limitation of all forms of power through a
higher principle called, especially since the French and American
Declarations, human rights. This moral individualism, first born and
applied in Britain and whose best sociological definition is to be found in
T. H. Marshall's classical book, has not ceased to spread and to become
more concrete, leading to industrial democracy. In our century, cultural
rights, often called subjective rights, have been added to social rights. This
entails that the authorities should respect everyone's cultural practices
and values, and therefore respect cultural diversity, and recognise that
all individuals have the right to engage in activities to which they
attribute a positive value. Here I use an expression which is very close to
that of Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, who, after having taught at
the London School of Economics, now holds a chair of economy and
philosophy at Harvard.
The idea of human rights calls forth the idea of solidarity, defined as
the set of collective safeguards that guarantee and assist each of us in the
construction of our own personal life project. Here again we observe a
profound transformation of the idea of democracy, such as defined by
Lincoln's famous formula (the government of the people for the people,
and by the people), into the recognition of inter-individual, inter-cultural
and inter-political diversity: in a world which is dominated on the one
hand by financial powers and on the other by authoritarian
neocommunitarian regimes. This statement takes on special significance
when applied, for example, to a situation such as that of Algeria where,
caught between two equally authoritarian and destructive military and
 Culture without Society 149

political forces, truly democratic claims have great difficulty in being

heard.
We have arrived so far away from our point of departure that we
must further explore the trajectory we have been introducing.
At our starting point, we defined culture as the set of principles
capable of assuring the integration of a society, which necessarily made
itself of a diversity of crafts and functions. The complementarity of
culture and society is here reinforced by the link established between
them by a system of social hierarchy, which transform values into means
of legitimating the power and authority structure in which social
practices took place. Following this logic, the twentieth century has been
for the most part dominated by political powers and ideologies. This has
been for the best and the worst, since the century has witnessed the birth
of industrial democracy and social democracy, but, on the other hand,
has suffered several types of totalitarian regimes. Still, after the Second
World War, in most parts of the world national projects for development
have been born, and their success, as well as that of the very idea of
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development, has expressed the strength of these global conceptions of

society.
Yet this image of a society as its own end, in which what is good is
defined by the general interest and by social integration, has weakened,
even disintegrated, as a result of the development of the capitalist
economy and of the parallel decline of social norms under the pressure
of increasing demands for cultural tolerance.
This development has led in two opposite directions. Liberal thought
has increasingly conceived of social life as a set of markets and has thus
rid itself of the idea of culture, an idea which always introduces a
principle of unity and regulation. In an opposite direction, radical
thought has seen social life as the pure expression of increasingly
omnipresent and unchallengeable logics of power. The result of these
dual critiques is that the image of an integrated social system, and of a
tight correspondence between culture, society and personality, such as
Talcott Parsons attempted to reconstruct in the middle of our century,
appears today as totally foreign to our experience It even appears as an
archaic attempt to analyse modern societies according to a model which
has precisely been destroyed by modernity.
We must therefore abandon the idea of society, and especially the idea
that there exists a complementarity between society and culture. At the
same time we must distance ourselves from radical tendencies which
maintain the idea that society is unified and integrated only through
power. We must recognise the growing separation between economic
and technological activities on the one hand and identity and
neocommunitarian politics on the other. Such a separation entails the
desocialisation of economic activities, pushing the capitalist revolution
to an extreme, and leading to demodernization and to the loss of unity of
 150 Alain Touraine

what we still sometimes call societies. If we do not want to accept this

dangerous and complete separation between the world of
instrumentality and the world of identities, we are led towards a
redefinition of culture as a non-social principle for combining the two
worlds.
I have defined this principle as the Subject, motivated by its need for
individuation which can only be fulfilled through the combination of
economic activity and cultural identity, of market and memory. We must
now demonstrate directly how this need for subjectivation as a non-
social principle for organising social life forces us to transform our
definition of culture. It forces us to consider culture no longer as a means
for legitimating a social order, a type of economic activity or a national
conscience, but rather as a return to freedom and to the Subject's
creativity against the market, as well as against neo-communitarian
powers. Such a definition of culture is in equally complete opposition
with illuminist universalism as with complete cultural differencialism. The
last completion here imprisons each one of us within the essence of a
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religious or national culture, thus creating a community of destiny, a

Schicksalsgemeinschaf, in the words of nineteenth century German
intellectuals. The idea of the Subject, on the contrary, is related to the
universalism of human rights, yet it is far from the Enlightenment
because it does not call for a universal principle placed far above social
realities, as well as because it does not place equality in the sole realm of
the law without addressing the question of social inequality and cultural
domination.
The cultural realm is redefined as that of the meeting point, the
combination of instrumental rationality and personal or collective
cultural identity. We must protect not simply citizens, but real
individuals and workers - as well as the increasing numbers of bearers
of transmitted or reconstructed cultures - as individuals and members of
groups who seek to combine instrumentality and identity. While culture
was previously defined by values, norms and institutionalised customs,
today it must be defined as an area of freedom which protects each
group or individual's will and capacity to produce and to defend its own
individuation. Culture must be defined by liberty, and thus by the
absence of any principle of integration. It does not lead to a positive
essentialised definition of man, woman, Christianity or Islam, but rather
to the critical assertion of the individual's right to free him or herself
from all logics of power and domination. To be more specific, culture is
the field in which we assert that we can live together, equal yet different.
As long as culture is the cement of a society, it is impossible to
conceive that human beings can be at once equal and different. As Louis
Dumont and Clifford Geertz have repeated: either we are equal because
beyond our differences and against these differences we all benefit from
the same rights, or we recognise our differences and they are then
 Culture without Society 151

inseparable from inequalities. These critiques from anthropologists

essentially demonstrate that it is only possible to combine equality and
diversity above and beyond all forms of membership in a social body.
Our modern democratic societies have proclaimed equal rights for all
inside the political sphere defined by people's sovereignty and the
legislative structure, while the social sphere has remained a world of
differences and of inequality. This social sphere is strongly hierarchized,
while on a legal level the proclamation of equality has meant the
rejection of diversity and cultural identities. Such a solution has
represented an immense step forward from so-called traditional
societies, in the sense that it has created a political space distinct from
social and cultural areas of domination. But this solution has weakened
with the opening up of the public sphere, and the addition of diverse
social and cultural rights to the previous civic rights. This new situation
questions a principle of equality which towers above social and cultural
differences, and as a direct consequence, the forms of inequality which
have freely developed outside the legal sphere. Once we have
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abandoned this separation between positive law and natural law, or the
separation of the political and the social orders, so characteristic of the
Aristotelian tradition, the right to individuation enables us to combine
equality and difference. One might add that such a situation is
vulnerable to invasion by a culturalism and a differentialism that reject all
principles of equality. But the idea of the Subject protects from such a
danger. It maintains a principle of equality, and consequently a principle
of pluralism. Only in a socially and politically pluralistic multicultural
society can equality and difference live together and combine.
The Subject looks for a combination of the diversity of cultural
experiences with equal participation in the world of technology and
market. This combination can happen only if the definition of the
individual is neither instrumental nor identity based, but instead rests
upon the idea of the Subject and thus upon the very combination of
these two spheres of life which naturally tend to separate and to destroy
each other in the absence of the idea of the Subject and of its right to
individuation.
The cultural domain is therefore in constant opposition with the two
increasingly separated sides of social life: globalization of the economy
and cultural differentialism. Far from being a cementing force, a culture
which rests upon the freedom of the subject protects certain rights rather
than defining certain obligations.
This explains why the analysis of cultures is more and more parallel
to the study of personality and collective actions which define
themselves as movements for personal and collective liberation. Since
the time of Freud, we constantly associate psychology with sociology in
an anthropology of dependence and freedom. I have already underlined
the central importance of women's thinking and actions aimed at ending
 152 Alain Touraine

their dependence and defining their freedom. But we can recall other
themes which express a positive meaning of the culture of freedom. This
idea can be applied to many aspects of social life, particularly education.
For a long time, school was defined as a socialising institution. Such was
Rousseau's idea in Emile, and such has remained the dominant idea
according to which schools must form social beings, citizens, workers,
fathers or mothers. Yet in this domain, as in all others, the split between
the objective and the subjective world, leading to the desocialisation
which I have previously defined, is so rapidly destroying traditional
conceptions that all countries feel that their educational system is in
crisis. Students are torn between a utilitarian conception of schooling; a
student consumerism and the creation of a youth culture entirely
independent from schooling. Teachers feel threatened by this double
decomposition of the traditional academic culture. Only if we develop
an educational system based on the reinforcement of the personal
Subject will we succeed in overcoming the crisis. We need educational
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systems which encourage each student to construct a personal project

that combines instrumentality and expressivity; participation in the
technical and economic world and a personal and collective identity.
Here, we can observe that schooling has changed less rapidly than
family life, but that it must progress in the same direction: provided that
the family is less and less perceived as an institution or a means of
transmitting a material and cultural heritage and more and more a
means of subjectivation through parent-child relations.

VI
To the extent that our culture is defined by freedom's struggle both
against market imperialism and the spirit of authoritarian neo-
communitarianism, freedom is strong when its adversaries are weak. As
far as the market is concerned, we have known for long that it's pressure
can be lightened only through public intervention, whether through the
State, collective agreements or through the intervention of those local
administrations, professional organisations or associations that make up
a grassroots democracy. For a number of decades we have witnessed the
triumph of the market system and the decline of state interventions
characteristic of the post war period. My hypothesis is that we are
already beginning to see the end of this wave of liberalism and the
strengthening of workers' reactions against flexibility and instability.
This can be observed in Germany, Korea, Belgium and other European
countries. As far as the communitarian sphere is concerned, the
weakening of identification of symbols and mechanisms that denote
group membership appears as the main condition for the personal
Subject's freedom. The West Indian writer Edouard Glissant, as well as
 Culture without Society 153

Salman Rushdie, have described these weakening modes of

identification which combine two or several socio-cultural realities,
thereby producing personalities oriented more toward individual rather
than collective problems.
But to these indirect negative conditions for the reinforcement of
freedom we must add direct positive conditions.
The main force leading to the emergence of the Subject, and more
generally to a politics based on the defence of the Subject, is the rejection
of its adversaries: an all powerful market system on the one hand, and a
communalism that imposes purity and homogeneity on the other.
The first one is direct. It is the refusal of all that appears intolerable or
scandalous. This leads to moral rather than political protest. When
intellectuals or political leaders speak in the name of those who are
excluded, they do not refer to a class consciousness as did working class
militants, since the excluded have only their deprivations in common.
They refer simply to their own sense of revolt which, as we well know,
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does not mobilise reactions any more than the violence of the leftists
groups was able to mobilise Italian or German workers, or any more
than Che Guevara mobilised the Guarani peasants in Bolivia. This aspect
of the movement towards subjectivation is thus more spectacular than
efficient, and has more influence on intellectuals or religious thinkers
than on those who are directly concerned. It is nonetheless necessary, for
at the heart of all social movements there is revolt based on moral
indignation and the sense of what is intolerable. Well before it seeks to
elaborate a strategy or to form alliances, the first step of any social
movement is to express a moral rejection and to attack ideologies which
legitimate non-democratic powers.
It is more difficult to define motivations or resources capable of being
mobilised directly for the defence of subjectivation. Mass society, and
especially mass consumption, are based on a clear, powerful motivation,
that is, the search for pleasure. On the other hand communitarian
tendencies rest upon an equally strong search for group membership. How
then to define a motivation that can override both the search for pleasure
and loyalty toward the community? It seems to me impossible to define
such a motivation at a psychological level without reverting to the
illusions of the ego and its consciousness, in other words, to the feeling
of satisfaction derived from conformity to established rules or the
accomplishment of social obligations. This leads us to believe that the
personal Subject can positively assert itself only through mutual
recognition with another personal Subject, through communication
between groups or individuals who recognise each other as Subjects, once
again in the sense Charles Taylor gives to that word. At a more collective
level, this idea creates a strong link between the idea of the personal
Subject and that of a democracy defined as a Subject-centred politics.
This idea is clearly close to Habermas's analysis, while remaining
 154 Alain Touraine

somewhat distinct. It aims at constructing a cultural area structured

around communication between Subjects and organised and protected
by democratic institutions which constitute what I have termed the
politics of the Subject. Such a cultural area stands between the world of
networks and flows and that of the identities created by
neocommunitarian powers; and resists pressures which come from both
sides.

VII
Now that we have described and recognised this double resistance of the
Subject's cultural space - to the realm of instrumentality on the one hand
and to that of identity politics on the other - we must return to the
cultural realm itself, the realm in which communication between
Subjects and democracy takes place.
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We must first recognise the power of what we might call the

temptation of individualism. Separated from the world of instrumentality
and divorced from neo-communitarian ideologies, the personal Subject
may identify with its own self expression. A few days ago, in a
bookstore in Amsterdam, I saw a poster that said: 'my body is not a
prison, it's an amusement park7. The freeing of one's desire, of all
imaginable expressions of sexuality, language or music, appears as
individual resistance to the pressures exerted by the two worlds which
threaten one's freedom. For over twenty years now this hyper-
individualistic tendency has been analysed and criticised by many
sociologists such as Lasch and Sennett. This individualism is illusory.
Those who believe that they are satisfying only their own personal
preferences are surprised to learn from the sociologists that their choice
of food, music, reading and even their childrens' names are determined
by their age, sex, socio-economic status and the country or area in which
they live. But this is not just an individualistic culture. Individual life is
constantly invaded by technological and market forces. It is also invaded
by identity politics, by the individual's identification with a sect, a
church, a political or national movement. For these reasons, the theme of
the liberation of one's desire and imagination is not artificial. It occupies
an important place within the public arena, especially among the urban
youth of developed countries and notably in places where the
mechanisms of socialisation are in decline. In fact, however, such a
theme acts as a shield against the threats to the Subject's personal
freedom rather than representing a positive content.
Such an individualism cannot by itself become a social movement,
and certainly cannot impose its own demands upon the forces that
threaten it. For such a thing to be possible, individualism has to be
transformed into a claim for individuation. Despite their similarities, these
 Culture without Society 155

two terms designate very different realities. Individuation is not simply

the possibility to freely express uncontrolled impulses and desires, but
on the contrary to consider as a central goal the capacity to construct
one's own personal, coherent and meaningful experience: what we
might call a project or a life story. I have called this demand for
individuation subjectivation. In a situation where the references to
transcendent values such as God or History have disappeared, and
where the idea of general interest, common good or collective utility is
declining, subjectivation considers the individual's integration of all
aspects of his or her experience into a life project as a, if not the, central
value. Such a person thereby resists living only in terms of a series of
successive experiences; of zapping between programs and products
offered by mass consumption; of being swept away by collective
mobilisations.
The demand for subjectivation creates a cultural realm because it is a
moral principle. It names what is good or bad, that which should be
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morally condemned, that which should be supported.

VIII
Subjectivation is not only rejection of two opposite threats. It counter-
attacks the instrumental and communal worlds, and aims to free some of
the most fundamental aspects of social action that have been imprisoned
by these two worlds.
As far as the instrumental world is concerned, the aim is to
rediscover the value of work as a principle for organising and reinforcing
personal projects, especially nowadays when the domination of the
market and globalizing factors weakens the workplace by imposing
constant changes in the conditions of production. Even though it is more
and more difficult for workers to keep stable working conditions, it is
important for State or collective interventions to guarantee a continuity
of professional activity, especially when such an activity takes place
within ever changing economic and organisational frameworks. At a
time when we constantly hear of the 'end of work', even of the triumph
of a civilisation of leisure, I wish to take an opposing stand. While work
conditions are increasingly dominated by the market, individuals have a
growing need for continuity and personal stability. In more classical
sociological terms, we may speak of the increasing importance of
professionalization which compensates for the declining loyalty to
companies and workplaces..
At the other end of the spectrum, against identity politics,
subjectivation aims at freeing cultural beliefs from particular forms of
social organisation or from their submission to a political project. The
example which immediately comes to mind is that of religion. In the
 156 Alain Touraine

same way that we broke down a church-dominated society, often in the

very name of Christianity, we hear today, and particularly among
educated young women, a reference to Islam as a liberating force, as a
means to claim modernity. Such a claim is difficult and often doomed.
We then observe the decomposition of religious life into religious
politics on the one hand, and a religious sentiment devoid of
organisational and cultural structures on the other. These opposing
tendencies are equally destructive of efforts at subjectivation. The
personal Subject attributes the force of a universal principle to the search
for individuation, because he or she recognises that all men and women
share a non-social definition of the human condition. This is why the
example of religion is so important. Religion helps the personal Subject
acquire a capacity for collective action; a capacity for recognising other
individuals or groups as Subjects.
In the same way that the defence of work resists the domination of
the market, the reference to beliefs and universal principles are counter
forces to identity politics. This double movement gives a concrete social
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content to subjectivation. We can speak therefore of a cultural universe,

in which value orientations can define forms of resistance against the
invasive power of both markets and communitarian forces.
The moral principle of subjectivation is the only one capable of
creating a free cultural space. Neither instrumental reason, nor the
defence of cultural identities, can play such a role, even when they both
claim to represent a global and self-sufficient principle for directing
collective life and personal behaviour.

IX
We have come far from both the classical as well as the postmodern
conceptions of culture.

• If culture is always the construction of practices and symbolic

representations, its nature and expressions are different in different
types of society. In those which reproduce a certain order rather than
produce change, culture can be analysed primarily as a series of laws
which regulate exchanges. In societies called historical, which are
dominated by what I call their 'historicity', or their capacity to act
upon themselves, culture is closely connected to processes of change.
Technology, modes of production, education and political
institutions are so interconnected that their continuous change is
called 'development'. Not only are we very far from a society of
reproduction, but we also belong less and less to the category of
modern societies: the capitalist revolutions and technological
innovations have broken the link between movement and order,
 Culture without Society 157

between economic and social realms, between politics and culture.

We can no longer consider our society to be a pyramid at the summit
of which cultural values are transformed into social norms, which in
turn become modes of social organisation and interaction.
• These observations seem to lead us towards a postmodern
conception. Have I not myself spoken of demodernization, a process
which appears to lead directly to a postmodern society? I am
prevented from accepting such a conclusion by the fact that, when
separated, the economic world and the world of cultural identities
inevitably degenerate into the jungle of financial economy on the one
hand, and into authoritative neocommunitarian politics on the other.
We must then find a principle for reconstruction and adopt a mode of
thought which one might call post-postmodern. I prefer to call such an
analysis neo-modern, in order to demonstrate that the principle of
modernity - that which I call historicity, and Anthony Giddens
reflexivity - far from having disappeared, are stronger and more
central than ever. Postmodernism only describes the breakdown I
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have described: either it considers the market as the only means of

communication between groups and individuals, or it refuses the
hegemony of the power system, as do all identity politics. The liberal
and the radical versions appear to be complementary in that each one
identifies with one of the universes increasingly separated from one
another, namely that of instrumental action and cultural identities.
This makes it necessary to build a bridge, or rather to create an
intermediary territory capable of overcoming or limiting the
separation of the two continents. The idea of culture, once it has been
freed from the declining idea of society, becomes the main principle
for constructing the personal Subject's territory, where it can
communicate with other Subjects and where democracy can develop.
I think that postmodern thought cannot elaborate a conception of
democracy. On the contrary, the idea of the Subject is inseparable
from that of democracy, to which it lends a force that cannot gain the
ultra-liberal conception that reduces democracy to the absence of a
monopolistic power.

It is also by following this neo-modern path that social sciences can

redefine their field. Such a science was first called the comparative study
of civilisations, then legal and political philosophy, then, for over a
century and a half, sociology, and today should be called the knowledge
of social action, whether designated as Handeln, agency or action. The
idea of culture, which has been separated from that of society, which in
turn has lost its unity and usefulness, is now tightly connected with the
ideas of social action and social movement. Such a transformation
defines best the field of present day social sciences.